Communities all over the country are struggling to find answers to the issue of the increasing numbers of homeless people and people living in poverty. Most of those communities are themselves struggling with budget problems and, at best, are only able to come up with Band-Aid solutions. What’s happening here in the richest country in the world? Do we just have a lot of lazy people?

Let’s take a look at some numbers (compiled by Bill Moyers and Company): families of 4 living on less than $11,510 (poverty level for one person) number 20.4 million, that’s 1 in 15 Americans, 7.1 million are children; 25 percent of U.S. jobs pay below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000/year; in 2011 28 percent of all workers earned poverty level wages. Overall 50 percent of U.S. workers earn less than $34,000/year. Meanwhile, worldwide, the richest 85 people own more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion, half the people on the planet. The wealth disparity in this country is about equivalent to the world picture and the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer.

The new Republican majority is out to shoot down Social Security but if we hadn’t had Social Security in 2012, 61.8 million people would have been living in poverty. Roughly half the people in the U.S. experience poverty by age 65.

The net worth of the Forbes 400 in 1989 was $455 million; in 2012 it was $2 trillion. According to the U.N. Development Program, the net worth of the median American fell 10 percent between 1989 and 1997. The net worth of the top 1 percent is now 2.4 times the combined wealth of the bottom 80 percent.

After WWII, emphasis was on a growing middle class; people assumed that hard work would provide the chance to buy a home, a car, to save for retirement and give your children a chance at a better life. It was not a great world for all — America did not offer the same opportunity to people of color — but even for many people of color there were increasing opportunities because the country was manufacturing and growing in many directions and companies like General Motors (the largest private sector employer after the war) paid unionized workers good wages and good benefits. Now the largest private sector employer is Walmart, which opposes unions and pays low wages with minimal benefits.

What we have is unbridled capitalism with no moral imperatives and it’s a system that’s out of order. As the fat cats got fatter they were able to buy up more and more of the government and have more and more control over the rules that govern their behavior. A prime rule of unfettered capitalism is that large scale unemployment is necessary in order to keep corporate profits high by keeping costs of labor low. The result is that in my younger days it was a rare thing to see a homeless person even in New York; now there’s no place that does not abound with homeless.

According to the Census data on poverty there are 1,168.354 homeless children in public schools. What’s it like for those children who go to school unable to bathe, with clothes less than shiny clean, hungry bellies, tired from lack of sleep and likely to be the butt of jokes and taunts, hardly able to do school work? The annual cost of child poverty nationwide is $500 billion. Federal funding for low income housing assistance programs in 2012 was less than $50 billion.

The rich demonize the homeless, they teach the public to blame the homeless and shun them because they are less than. That takes the attention off them and puts it on the victim.

The truth is that it would cost society less to house, feed and help people to stabilize their lives than it does to leave them unaided. But this country has been built on economic inequity from its start and now the inequities have reached a zenith that threatens everything unless, we the people, demand to take our government back, that the rich pay taxes, workers get their fair share and end poverty and homelessness.